Habib Tanvir

Habib Tanvir (1 September 1923 – 8 June 2009 ) was one of the most popular Indian Urdu, Hindi playwrights, a theatre director, poet and actor.

He passed his matriculation from Laurie Municipal High School, Raipur, and later completed his B.A. from Morris College, Nagpur in 1944.

Thereafter he studied M.A. for a year at Aligarh Muslim University.

Early in life, he started writing poetry using his pen name Takhallus.

Soon after, he assumed his name, Habib Tanvir.

In 1945, he moved to Bombay, and joined All India Radio (AIR) Bombay as a producer.

While in Bombay, he wrote songs for Urdu and Hindi films and even acted in a few of them.

He also joined the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) and became an integral part of Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) as an actor.

Later, when most of the prominent IPTA members were imprisoned for opposing the British rule, he was asked to take over the organisation.

He was the writer of plays such as, Agra Bazar (1954) and Charandas Chor (1975).

In 1954, he moved to New Delhi, and worked with Qudsia Zaidi's Hindustani Theatre, and also worked with Children's theatre, where he authored many plays.

In 1955, when he was in his 30s, Habib moved to England.

There, he trained in Acting at Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) (1955) and in Direction at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (1956).

For the next two years, he travelled through Europe, watching various theatre activities.

One of the highlights of this period, was his eight-month stay in Berlin in 1956, during which he got to see several plays of Bertolt Brecht, produced by Berliner Ensemble, just a few months after Brecht's death.

This proved to have a lasting influence on him, as in the coming years, he started using local idioms in his plays, to express trans-cultural tales and ideologies.

This, over the years, gave rise to a "theatre of roots", which was marked by an utter simplicity in style, presentation and technique, yet remaining eloquent and powerfully experiential.

A deeply inspired Habib returned to India in 1958 and took to directing full-time.

He produced Mitti ki Gaadi a post-London play, based on Shudraka's Sanskrit work, Mrichakatika.

It became his first important production in Chhattisgarhi.

This was the result of the work he had been doing since his return – working with six folk actors from Chhattisgarh.

A pioneer in Urdu and Hindi theatre, he was most known for his work with Chhattisgarhi tribals, at the Naya Theatre, a theatre company he founded in 1959 in Bhopal.

He went on to include indigenous performance forms such as nacha, to create not only a new theatrical language, but also milestones such as Charandas Chor, Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damad and Kamdeo ka Apna Basant Ritu ka Sapna.

For him, true "theatre of the people" existed in the villages, which he strived to bring to the urban "educated", employing both folk performers as actors alongside urban actors.

He went on to found "Naya Theatre", a theatre company in 1959.

During his lifetime he won several national and international awards, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1969, Jawarharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1979, Padma Shri in 1983, Kalidas Samman 1990, Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 1996, and the Padma Bhushan in 2002.

In his exploratory phase, i.e. 1970–73, he broke free from one more theatre restriction – he no longer made the folk artistes, who had been performing in all his plays, speak Hindi.

Instead, the artistes switched to Chhattisgarhi, a local language they were more accustomed to.

Later, he even started experimenting with "Pandavani", a folk singing style from the region and temple rituals.

This made his plays stand out amidst the gamut of plays which still employed traditional theatre techniques like blocking movements or fixing lights on paper.

Spontaneity and improvisation became the hallmark of his new theatre style, where the folk artistes were allowed greater freedom of expression.

Apart from that he had also been nominated to become a member of the Upper House of Indian Parliament, the Rajya Sabha (1972–1978).

His play Charandas Chor (Charandas, The Thief) won him the Fringe Firsts Award at Edinburgh International Drama Festival in 1982, and in 2007, it was included in the Hindustan Times' list of 'India's 60 Best works since Independence which said : "an innovative dramaturgy equally impelled by Brecht and folk idioms, Habib Tanvir seduces across language barriers in this his all-time biggest hit about a Robin Hood-style thief."

He was born in Raipur, Chhattisgarh (erstwhile Madhya Pradesh) to Hafiz Ahmed Khan, who hailed from Peshawar.

He died on 8 June 2009 at Bhopal after a three-week-long illness.

Upon his death, he was the last of pioneering actor-managers in Indian theatre, which included Sisir Bhaduri, Utpal Dutt and Prithviraj Kapoor, and often he managed plays with a mammoth cast, such as Charandas Chor, which included an orchestra of 72 people on stage and Agra Bazaar, with 52 people.

Later in the same year, he produced his first significant play Agra Bazar based on the works and times of the plebeian 18th-century Urdu poet, Nazir Akbarabadi, an older poet in the generation of Mirza Ghalib.

For this play he brought together local residents and folk artistes from Okhla village in Delhi and students of Jamia Millia Islamia creating a palette never seen before in Indian theatre.

Additionally, the play was not staged in a confined space, rather a bazaar, a marketplace.

After this, he continued to work with non-trained actors and folk artistes like the folk artists of Chhattisgarh.